TweetDeck Deal: Twitter Wants to Control How You Tweet

If the talk is true, Twitter now owns TweetDeck. According to CNN, Twitter finalized the paperwork on Monday in order to buy the popular third party application in a deal worth more than $40 million.

TweetDeck, as you may know, is like other Twitter applications in that it interfaces with the Twitter API so you can use it to tweet important things such as your love for bacon and your dislike for mosquitoes.

What makes it different from regular Twitter? Fans says it's much more user-friendly, has fun features, and can consolidate all social media updates in one desktop window.

Since so many people use TweetDeck and prefer it, the acquisition may be a little worrying. Will Twitter ultimately rebrand and repurpose this product? And why is this company, supposedly based on an open exchange of information, systematically eliminating all of its competition?

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Twitter's strategy has generally been to either downplay competing apps or buy them. In 2010, Twitter bought Tweetie and made it as Twitter for iPhone, and in 2008, it acquired the Summize search engine and turned it into Twitter Search.

With 42 percent of all tweets being made using non-official Twitter services and applications, Twitter seems to be on a mission to gain back control of their user experience. Rumors were swirling that competing UberMedia was originally in talks to acquire TweetDeck, and Twitter swooped in to make sure they didn't lose more market control to a third party developer.

The bottom line seems to be that Twitter wants you using native Twitter apps. They want to control the way you interact with Twitter, and they want to be the ones to monetize from your tweeting habit.

Now, what does Twitter plan to do with TweetDeck, exactly? That's the 40 million-dollar question. If I were a dedicated TweetDeck user, I might be worrying about a future version stripped of the support for competing social media sites—and sprinkled with promotions.